1 day Ago
Sunday print newspapers were big and fat, and my job was to deliver them. When I buy a new suit, my left arm hangs longer than my right arm from carrying those papers. They were so big that it was often a challenge for my elderly customers to lug one of them from the front porch to the kitchen table without the sections falling everywhere.
The colorful magazines, supplements, comprehensive advertising printouts, and other items were jammed in between the dozens of pages of local, regional, national, and world news by kids like me. They provided a virtual plethora of information for their readers. It took at least an hour or more to get through all that material.
Unlike today’s iPads and televisions, these remnants of slaughtered trees were Sunday’s leisurely reading pleasure. As an 8-year-old, my mother’s older sisters selected me to be the recipient of her son Jack’s paper route. He was, in fact, on his way to becoming a freshman at Saint Vincent College, and someone had to keep up the family paperboy tradition.
Because I was a well-recognized hustler who was a committed, hard-working kid, my aunt identified me as Jack’s heir apparent. Her decision made me so happy because I would have more money to buy penny candy and sodas from her store. She was no dummy.
One challenge with being an underdeveloped little kid was that of pure strength. Yes, I could reach speeds on my bike of at least 12 mph, could climb trees, and was great at wrestling empty cardboard boxes to the burn pile behind her store. Because I was never without a penknife, I could easily cut the bailing twine that wrapped the newspapers they threw out of the back of a covered pick-up truck as it sped past the mud lot out front.
What I could not easily do, however, was carry the Sunday newspapers. If each paper weighed slightly less than a pound, I was looking at practically matching my weight in lug load on Sundays. Because of that, I had to make a business investment that should have been a tax-deductible allowance before I knew what tax, business, allowances, or deductions were.
I needed to get a wagon to haul the papers around on Sundays. I had wanted to buy a wagon with removable wooden fence-like sides. There were no department or toy stores near us.
So that was not happening. I ended up buying one with removable metal sides. You might think that was a more substantial and even better choice, but that’s where you were wrong.
That wagon made more noise than a dozen buckboards in a cowboy movie. Think of the Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon pulled over Macadam streets. People could hear me coming from a block away, and when I say people, I mean their dogs, too.
Dogs loved to chase my wagon, and there was no keeping my arrival secret with that bucket of bolts. When I went past the Nazarene Church with its open windows, I am sure many of their most solemn prayers did not survive my noisy presence. When the weather went Nordic, I had to switch to a sled with a wooden box nailed to it, but when I turned 12 and had some other responsibilities, my dad agreed to start driving me around with my papers in the back seat of our Ford Falcon.
I am sure the wear and tear on that Falcon far exceeded the cash I would pocket every Sunday from my five-cent profit on each paper. I spent those profits on one-cent pretzel sticks, sodas, penny candy, clothes, plastic model airplanes, rockets, and cars. If I had just saved it, I would be a retired benevolent despot living on my island by now.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident..
